Annette Cycon, founder of MotherWoman, and Liz Friedman, program director at the Hadley-based organization, work together to empower mothers and debunk myths about motherhood.

Photo by JUDITH KELLIHER

Editor's note:In conjunction with International Women's Day on March 8, The Republican is featuring more than a dozen area women and their accomplishments in profiles during March, which is also Women's History Month. Many of the profiles will appear in Pioneer Valley Life and on MassLive.Com on March 2.

Annette Cycon and Elizabeth "Liz" A. Friedman were strangers, living in different states, and who unbeknownst to each other, were on parallel paths to empower mothers.

In 1999, Cycon, a licensed clinical social worker, started MotherWoman, a Hadley-based nonprofit organization dedicated to the empowerment of mothers.

She came up with the idea of support groups for mothers in response to an unmet need she saw as “the invisibility of the role and the importance of mothers in the shaping of our children, our families and our communities.”

Meanwhile, Friedman started informal meetings of new mothers where she was living in Providence, R.I., after experiencing a "very severe crisis postpartum" and finding little support to help her deal with this after the birth of her first child.

The two women eventually connected when Friedman found MotherWoman in a Google search in 2004 about mothers’ support groups in Western Massachusetts at a time when she and her family planned to move there.

After living in the area for a while, Friedman eventually reached out to Cycon, 55, to learn more about the group and attended a workshop on motherhood.

Those interactions resulted in Friedman, 45, joining the organization as program director.

“I went to the support group and was absolutely inspired. Annette was on fire and completely on point,” said Friedman, who founded the perinatal support arm of MotherWoman.

“I remember a follow-up meeting and basically laid my cards on the table and said I want to do this with you and to lead this with you, so let’s go.”

Since then, MotherWoman has grown to include not only mothers’ support groups, but also offers training to community leaders and health professionals to run their own such groups, provides professional training to medical and social service providers in the area of postpartum depression and encourages mothers to get educated about policy issues impacting families and to get politically involved.

In Cycon’s experience as a mother and a therapist, the role of mothers is often misunderstood.

“We make a lot of assumptions about how strong mothers are and how important they are yet we don’t actually support them truly and we don’t ask them honestly to tell us how they are,” she said.

“This is an awful lot to expect for one person to be perfect every day of the week in an endless well of giving.”

One of the fundamental roots of MotherWoman is a consciousness-raising model that allows women to come together to speak truthfully about “the good, the bad and the ugly” of being a mother, which exposes what’s common among all mothers so they can “relieve the guilt, understand the paradigm and realize it’s not ‘me’ there is something wrong with,” Friedman said.

“It’s actually a larger system and we look at how I both empower myself and my family while changing the system around me,” Friedman said.

Many women who join the programs offered by MotherWoman think they are alone in their struggles and frustrations, they say.

“We have mothers that come into our groups all the time who are pushing baby strollers wherever in this region and they see the woman across the street and think she’s got it all together,” Friedman said. “They don’t know that she is also probably suffering under the same weight and pressure.”

MotherWoman is a place where commonalities are discussed and myths get debunked so mothers can move forward in an empowering way, Cycon said.

“We created a safe space where women could come together and talk about the reality of motherhood in a non-shaming, blaming or judgmental environment so they could be honest and share what they’re experiencing and then they can think more clearly about what they need to do,” she said.

The daughter of Polish immigrants. Cycon holds a bachelor's degree cum laude in psychology and philosophy from Clark University in Worcester, and a master's degree in social work from Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

Cycon is married to Dean Cycon, owner of Dean’s Beans organic coffee company in Orange. The couple has two daughters, Sarah, 21, and Aliya, 19, who are both in college.

Friedman, who was a winner in a 2011 national essay contest on the role of women globally, has a master's in fine arts from Bard College with an undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her "You
are exactly/the right person/to be your child's' mother: A love poem and commitment for mothers" is used in MotherWoman's training session.

Friedman is married to Peter Kassis, a family physician in Springfield, and the couple has two children, Noah, 10, and Haliyah, 5.

Cycon and Friedman feel their empowerment of women will result in change over time to more equity in the workforce for mothers in terms of pay and family support.

“A lack of policy support keeps mothers in poverty and from being able to increase their economic base so they can thrive and not feel a constant sense of stress,” Friedman said.

“But I think that mothers are becoming more articulate even though the stresses have increased. The ability to have a dialogue in a meaningful way about these issues has moved everyone greatly forward.”

MotherWoman was a recipient of a 2012 Nonprofit Excellence in Advocacy Award from the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network.

MotherWoman was selected for the advocacy award, along with four others, for its work with Rep. Ellen Story, D-Amherst, in developing postpartum depression policies for all mothers in Massachusetts which resulted in the passage of the Postpartum Depression Legislation in 2010.

The award also honored MotherWoman's leadership in the effort to pass Earned Paid Sick Time legislation in Massachusetts.